The Pirate Bay promotes indie artists

Using The Pirate Bay to download legitimate content is sort of like reading Playboy for the articles. Some folks do, but most are there for the pirated stuff, a lot of which resembles what one might find on the pages of a gentleman's magazine. The popular torrent site has started promoting the work of independent artists who make their content available for free, though. Dubbed The Promo Bay, this "promotional apparatus" replaces The Pirate Bay's front-page logo with an image created by the artist, plus links to their work.

Although artists need not distribute their work on BitTorrent, users must have "easy access" to the content—no Facebook liking required. That content has to be offered for free, but artists can hawk merchandise alongside it.

According to TorrentFreak, over 5,000 artists have signed on to have their work promoted. Only 22 campaigns have been run so far, however. It seems there was more interest than anticipated, and the quality of work was better than expected. The Pirate Bay has gone from contemplating a few promotions a year to planning for one every weekend.

The few promotions that have run reportedly generated a lot of traffic for the artists. With a claimed user base of tens of millions, The Pirate Bay is certainly big enough to help independent artists build an audience. I wonder how many of those users would be inclined to shell out their hard-earned cash for content or even a t-shirt, though.